By Wayne Allensworth
When Joe Biden spoke at the White House following Donald Trump’s electoral and popular-vote blowout of Kamala Harris, a friend pointed out to me that Biden had promised a peaceful transfer of power. That was strange, given that he and the rest of the Democrats had for years been saying for years that Trump was an “existential threat to our democracy.” So, they really didn’t mean it? What’s more, it appears that the outstanding “lawfare” cases against the dangerous felon Trump will be closed, since he will be inaugurated in January. In her post-election speech to her followers, Kamala Harris assured them that everything would be OK. Really? No internment camps? No fascist dictatorship? Trump really isn’t the reincarnation of der Fuehrer?
This amusing electoral postscript reminds me that smug elites told the rest of us we had to wear masks and stay shut up in our houses, as Covid was another black plague — but our betters didn’t observe either restriction themselves, even as they allowed wave after wave of unvaccinated illegal aliens to stream into the country. One set of rules for them, another for the common riffraff. Or “garbage,” as Sleepy Joe put it.
What’s more, the “racist” Trump — he must be a “racist” because he is not one of them — garnered an unprecedented level of minority support for a GOP candidate. His America First coalition is multi-racial and multi-ethnic, a Coalition of the Sane whose guide is common sense, not “expert opinion.” After all, what have the “experts,” who put theory above experience, and who love with their theories and their own inflated opinions of themselves, done but sow chaos and degrade the economy, not to mention breed instability and the threat of war? It’s no anomaly that the war mongering neocons supported Harris.
Cognitive dissonance occurs when people hold strongly conflicting beliefs and try to find ways to resolve that conflict, either by changing those beliefs and behaviors, or perhaps by rejecting the truth of what their experience tells them, or memory-holing new information. Rationalization is part of the picture as well.
The pod people who man the Blob’s battle stations, and the empty suits who lead them, hate Donald Trump with a visceral intensity that reaches religious fervor. As your observer has written previously, what we are witnessing is essentially a religious struggle. Trump’s very existence, along with the tens of millions of ordinary Americans who support him, resulted in a bizarre psychological quandary for them. Trump’s America First program denied the validity of the managerial regime’s globalism, and his appeals to commonsense and ability to connect with ordinary people left them aghast and bewildered. They were the managerial “experts,” Why didn’t the ignorant masses do as they were told?
To “save our democracy,” which in their eyes meant the perpetuation and extension of woke corporatist globalism, the Blob’s Deep State arm concocted the wholly fraudulent “Russiagate” narrative. Which, I might add, in their eyes should have been true. After all, Trump was a heretic. He rejected their right to rule. He rejected their notion of “democracy,” He rejected their “experts” telling the rest of us what to do. Trump rejected an eschatological battle against evildoers around the globe who also rejected their worldview. Theirs was an ideological crusade to stamp out “fascism,” that is every traditional attachment, every moral norm, every roadblock to the globalist utopia, to “the end of history,” they envisioned.
The campaign against Trump and his followers violated every democratic norm the pod people supposedly pledged to defend. The Deep State used the Hillary Clinton-conceived Russia Collusion Hoax to spy on the Trump Collective and turned the concept of justice on its head by using the FBI as its political police. The Blob’s media arm went into full bore propaganda mode. The media bias was so obvious, the lies so glaring, the departure from every norm of ethical journalistic practice so evident, that only committed globalist ideologues and those who, seeing themselves a part of the expert class that deserved to rule, could and did ignore reality. The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story is a case in point. Trump, they asserted, was a fascist, MAGA a mob of neo-Nazis, and support for Trump was based on racism, misogyny, ignorance, and atavistic desires. It must be true. Acknowledging that the other side had a point would mean rejecting their entire worldview.
This rationalization of their perfidy produced the Trump-is-Hitler narrative, one that ignored what Trump actually did as president, which did not include jailing opponents or attempting to suppress free speech. It did not include using force to counter the impeachment proceedings against him. It even took him some time to get around to firing insubordinate officials in his own administration. Trump instead fought legal battles in court and when he lost, appealed those decisions. He suffered a barrage of personal attacks few could have withstood and used the machinery of representative democracy to win another term. There have been no attempted assassinations of his political opponents. His white working- and middle-class core, supposedly incurably racist, enthusiastically accepted the support of blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Muslims, anyone who had had enough. Those minorities, in turn, rejected the Democrats’ identity politics-based tunnel vision. Trump appealed to them on commonsense and bread and butter issues, and they responded.
After Trump’s landslide victory, which, again included winning the popular vote, meaning the Democrats could not complain about the Electoral College, the pod people are demoralized. How could they call out Antifa, their communist street army, to riot in the wake of such a resounding rejection of their agenda? They are frustrated and deflated, but I doubt that many of the pod people will reevaluate their views or admit anything more than tactical errors. They will regroup and resume the battle. If anything, in the minds of the most ideologically committed, losing will only prove that they were right, that the masses are an ignorant mob. Indeed, give them time. Recall what happened on Inauguration Day, 2017. Washington, D.C., was in flames.
To all of you, including some friends, who mistakenly bought their narrative, I ask you to reflect on what has happened and why. Lifelong Democrats like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. did. J.D. Vance, previously a Never Trumper, did as well and is now a capable member of the Trump “X-Men” team, a team including Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy that reflects a certain diversity in the America First coalition, but not the Blob’s identity-politics variety. These notable figures recognized that they believed in free speech and free and fair elections. That they rejected permanent warfare and the surveillance state. That oligarchy was the antithesis of a democratic republic. That “democracy” did not mean the rule of “experts” or an end of history utopianism, and that the millions who backed Trump were not a raging mob. They acted accordingly.
Some of you are neighbors, friends, and relatives, and never actually behaved as though the rest of us were Nazis or an ignorant mob. A realization of what has happened — and why — might cure the cognitive dissonance that must distress you. The truth has always been right in front of you.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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